As with most industries, the Internet has significantly affected the way in which the financial industry communicates with its customers. Most significantly, major financial institutions have found providing their customers with online access to their accounts both desirable, cost effective, and indeed necessary to remain competitive.
The financial industry faces special hurdles in providing online access to customer's accounts due to the very nature of the accounts being accessed. The account information maintained by financial institutions is probably the most important and private personal information that an institution can hold for a person. Accordingly, controlling access to this information is one of the most significant duties that must be performed by a financial institution.
Most large financial institutions have various divisions that separately handle different types of accounts for their customers. For example one division maintains personal banking accounts (e.g., checking and savings), another division handles mortgages, while yet other divisions are responsible for maintaining credit card and investments respectively. Furthermore, each of the types of accounts is typically governed by a different set of regulations. For example, the rules that govern a checking account are completely different from the rules that govern an investment account. For these reasons as well as others, the divisions within a financial institution have traditionally operated independently, each developing their own systems and methods for operating their particular line of business. Unfortunately, the development of these separate systems has included the separate development of Internet interfaces for communicating with customers. These separate interfaces are confusing to the customer and do not provide a uniform appearance of the financial institution to its customers.
Some financial institutions have attempted to solve this problem by provided links on a single institution web page that lead to the various systems of the divisions of the institution. One significant problem that persists is that a customer must separately sign up, verify ownership, and log onto the separate systems, providing separate passwords and separate verifications of ownership.
Other institutions have solved this problem by requiring ownership of a specific type of account (e.g., a checking account) and manually linking or otherwise associating the privileges of access of all other types of accounts to the required account. This reduces the number of customers with access to their account information and transaction capability to the customer base of the required account.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to solve the problems of the prior art in a system and method that requires only a single sign up, verification and single ID for a website that includes multiple applications and multiple services.